There is a jaw dropping line in an article today- "President Barack Obama and his Republican allies"

[JDPriestly]

52. Obama's trade deal is dividing our Democratic Party.

He needs to drop it and focus on reviving the American Main Stream economy. It's still a wreck. And people are getting impatient with the focus on trade deals that cost us jobs instead of building infrastructure and funding education here.

The winners in the 2008 stock market crash, those who have earned money from free trade, etc. need to pay taxes to fund recovery in the rest of the US. A recovery in which wages remain pretty much stagnant, the real unemployment numbers are too high and in which the real cost of living continues to rise faster than wages may look good on paper, but it does not feel good to working people.

Raise the taxes on those profiting from trade deals for massive repair and development of our infrastructure, job retraining (free not based on loans for education), free college, free day-care/pre-school, more money into Social Security and Medicare, and a social network for ordinary people.

And once all those measures are solidly in place, and the extreme right and Third Way Democrats accept that their economic models do not work, then we can talk about free trade.